


cabaletta

by hyperphonic



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Kylo Ren Redemption, anakin is (unsurprisingly) a meddling force ghost, anakin sees himself in little rey from jakku, if i'm not a jedi and you're not a sith then what the hell are we, padmé loves her grandson so much she deserves a goddamn award
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 22:06:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13726926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyperphonic/pseuds/hyperphonic
Summary: That night she dreams of the sands of Jakku, and Ben Solo draped in elaborate folds of fabric like the ones Anakin had told her to be a staple of the Naberrie house.





	cabaletta

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: all i own is one (1) sick ass "casual sex friday" coffee mug

The first time the Force connects them after the battle of Crait, Rey is sitting cross legged in her bunk upon the _Millennium Falcon_ , trying (and failing) to meditate. Today, her focus is turned inward towards the ship herself, mind tracing the spaces between panels and threads of the Force that collect around rivets. It has become a routine, her meditation with the ship; where she cannot find peace in her own flesh and blood, the familiar durasteel paneling sings like _home_. Rey closes her eyes to try and find some shaky semblance of control, and the _Falcon_ welcomes her with open arms.

Before she sees him she _feels_ him, as magnetic and dark as when they’d stood back to back in the flat red light of the Throne Room. The smuggling hold-turned-bunk she sits in is so small that when he appears, Kylo Ren seems to take up nearly all of it (certainly what his physical being doesn’t occupy, his energy does). He inhales as if to speak, but Rey strikes first, snapping a cool _No_ into their bond, all while trying to maintain the relative sense of calm she’d cultivated prior to his interruption. Ren’s breath stops short, and before she has time to open her eyes, the force bends and he is gone, leaving her alone in the stale, recycled air of her room.

She hates him. Hates the way she feels him in her bones, and the spaces between her ribs (ribs that now protrude less starkly from her skin, slowly receding under a new layer of muscle and fat). Hates how she dreams of him, of the way time almost seemed to stop entirely on Ahch-To when their fingers touched (hates how some of the tension around his eyes had lessened as he watched her delight at rain on her palm). She hates the divide between them, the furious energy of war laying at their feet like a physical, roiling beast.

She is a child of the desert, of sun that blisters skin to the bone and nights so cold they kill. On Jakku, it was _easy,_ almost _necessary_ to view the world in black and white; extremes that she now finds don’t quite fit in the great, dark expanse of space. Shoulders impossibly heavy, the Last Jedi (the accolade tastes sour, even in her mind) takes a few deep breaths of filtered air and turns her mind back to the circuitry of the _Falcon_. 

On the tenth light cycle, while exploring the labyrinth of smuggling compartments, Rey finds an old datapad in the belly of the ship. Its edges are worn, low grade durasteel scraped and cool against her hands. Intrigued, she settles into the dark and powers it on, face aglow as she swipes through the contents, filtering through old manifests and the occasional manual before finding the default set of encyclopedic files. Eyes just a little tight around the edges, Rey pulls up the file on the Galactic Civil war. The Skywalker name is everywhere, dotted throughout the bloodiest battles of the galaxy. Her stomach roils as she stares at the death toll after the Battle of Yavin. So many dead, both sides reeling in the aftermath. 

Luke Skywalker had killed exactly 1,575,230 people when he had destroyed the first _Death Star_. The number sits starkly on the grainy screen in front of her, 1,575,230 living, breathing people who had vanished into the long quiet of space with one Force aided blaster shot. Rey’s never met that many people in her _life_ let alone seen that many in one place. She thinks back to her time spent on Ahch-To, and the wry man who’d called the planet his home.

The _Falcon_ offers no comfort, only the quiet thrum of energy that moves through the plating around her, Rey thinks she’s going to be sick.

How could one person be heralded as a champion of the Light after destroying the lives of so many in one fell swoop? Where did that line lay? She too had dealt blows, killed in defense of those she loved (Rey refuses to think of the Praetorian Guards, or the way her heart had nearly stopped in the seconds before she had thrown Kylo Ren her lightsaber).  What did that make her? She certainly didn’t feel like a champion of the Light, she’d chafed at what little of the Jedi way Luke had managed to impart on her before- 

Rey powers down the datapad, and sets it in the same nook she’d pulled it from. The light cycle is drawing to a close, and she suddenly feels vaguely claustrophobic in the familiar dark of the _Falcon_. 

She’s halfway back to her bunk, just passing the gunning tower and its well-worn ladder when suddenly she feels the unmistakable magnetic tug in her wrists. Her gaze snaps up from the toes of her boots (still coated in a fine layer of Crait’s white salt) and land on the wide eyes of the Supreme Leader. They’re close enough in the old, fluorescent lighting of the _Falcon_ that she can see the freckles that dot his face, could almost count them if she wanted to (she _doesn’t_ ). He’s wearing his usual garb, lightsaber hung at his hip, the barest glint of its cross-guard glinting from underneath the heavy fabric of his cloak, she wonders why he no longer wears the mask (though she certainly doesn’t complain). Silence stretches out along the panels of durasteel between them, the pair studying one another in earnest. This time, he speaks first,

“The line between Dark and Light is less of a line, and more of a gradient.” Kylo deadpans, and Rey is so startled by the statement that she forgets to snap back, or demand how he had _gotten inside her head_ (she belatedly realizes that maybe they’ve been in each other’s minds for a while now). 

“I don’t believe the Force exists in such absolutes.” Rey feels the magnets in her wrist pulling ( _pullingpullingpulling_ ) and has to dig the soles of her boots into the durasteel beneath her in as much an act of mental control as physical before she can speak.

“There is no Emotion,” she breathes, heart in her throat.

“Only Peace,” Ren replies.

The Force rises and swells, like the great tides of ocean planets, or the way a _Star Destroyer_ groans before crumbling into the voracious dunes of Jakku, filling the air with its unmistakable energy. Rey wants to close the distance between them, (though to what end she can’t quite tell) wants to rip his gloves off and feel the current that runs underneath pale skin. Kylo clearly wants much the same as his lips part, then press together before he begins to move down the hallway, sending her heart stuttering and the Force tensing as if pulling them together. But then she blinks, and the hallway is empty save for the desperate sound of her own breathing. 

Rey is beginning to find a funny sort of calm in Hyperspace. She feels it most when she’s in the gunning tower of the _Falcon_ , knees drawn up to her chest and head tilted back to watch stars stream over her like some great river. Alone, with only the hum of the Force around her, she lets her mind wander, breathes in the familiar smell of the ship and lets her eyes glaze over. She wonders how much time Ben spent on this ship, wonders if he used to wander these halls much like she does now. It’s hard to imagine him as he exists now, all leather gloved hands and thickly layered uniform against the lovingly maintained interior of the _Falcon_ (she spends entire light cycles holed up among the stars, trying to fit the images together anyways).

It is on one such light cycle that the Force connects them again, announcing its presence as it always does, with an absence of sound, and the unmistakable _feeling_ of Kylo. However this time there is no stark visual of the Supreme Leader, only the most profound sense of his emotions Rey has ever felt, as if amplified by the lack of accompanying visual. He is calm, maybe the most so that Rey has ever felt him to be since their paths have crossed. If she focuses, _really_ focuses, she can feel long legs folded beneath him and the steady flow of the Force through his body. There is no mantra, no guiding chant like the ones Luke had taught her during their brief time together on Ahch-To, or the ones she has learned through her own research that the Sith used to employ, just the rise and fall of his chest moving as one with the Force.   

Though Rey cannot see the dark man, she has a distinct impression of him raising one eyebrow.

_Rey,_

His voice echoes across their connection, low and warm, sending (traitorous) goosebumps running up her arms. The Force shifts, as if bringing them even closer together, and Rey can smell the nondescript military soap that hangs on his jaw and throat, can almost _feel_ the heat radiating off his skin. His calm falters, hiccups against the brush of her mind, and over the pounding of her heart Rey wishes for the distance they’d just had. Kylo’s pulse races right along side hers, and for a second the only feeling across their bond is that of their hearts racing in tandem. 

Kylo is the one to break the silence, his end of the bond flaring to life with the thrum of deep seated anxiety Rey has come to associate with him.

_Meditate with me?_

Rey falters, forces her eyes to focus on the soothing glow of Hyperspace around her, and agrees.

It becomes routine, their shared meditation. They don’t speak, don’t attempt to traverse the lines of Dark and Light that lay tangled between them, just sit hip to hip, existing together in the Force. It’s through this that she learns Kylo nurses a chronic injury to his shoulder, one earned long ago in training as an adolescent. The pain is always there, a baseline that spikes when he goes to shed his tunic at the end of the day, or swings too heavily from his en garde position without proper warm up. She shares with him the phantom pain in her stomach from too many nights spent portion-less on Jakku, and the way it sometimes hurts to eat even still.

A standard month and a half into their shared meditation, Kylo appears in her room clutching a sleek black datapad. Ears slightly pink, he gives her the schematics of his lightsaber, supplements her technical knowledge with that of his own training to help repair the damage they’d inflicted in Snoke’s throne room.

_Double bladed?_

He inquires one evening as she sits tucked into the corner of her bunk, hair falling loosely around her face as she jots down final calculations on a datapad. Rey nods by way of explanation, and spares a glance at the kyber crystal sitting innocently on the blankets next to her.

_Why teach myself a new form when I’m already more than proficient in one?_

Kylo cannot argue the rationality of her point, so he just nods and continues to peer at careful calculations.

The first time Rey feels a presence in the Force other than Kylo’s she is sitting at her makeshift workbench on the _Falcon_ , squinting as she solders a particularly stubborn piece of wiring into the right hand casing of her saber-turned-staff. At first, admittedly halfhearted acknowledgement, Rey thinks it actually _is_ Kylo; the signature standing steadily next to her has the same, low current of power. However, upon powering down her tool, and looking up, she finds the figure behind the signature to be a man not much older than herself, with Kylo’s soft waves of hair, and a scar above one eye. Rey furrows her brow, and removes the protective mask she’d been wearing. 

“I like what you’ve done with it.” The man nods, lips pulling into a crooked smirk (Rey notes that his presence in the Force, while reminiscent of Kylo’s, is far, _far_ more stable).The robes he wears are black, layered with what looks to be a structured leather tunic, Rey finds herself squinting again. 

“That particular kyber crystal always was a little hard to work with, I’m glad to see it’s not just me who had an impossible time managing it.” One broad shoulder shrugs at the (prideful) admission, thickly layered robes rustling with the movement. 

“I’d try rewiring that ventral piece of converter you’ve got up near the head of the casing.”  The unnamed man leans in a bit closer to inspect her work, “and I would _definitely_ reinforce the conductors you have secured at the base, it will overwhelm those the second you ask it to withstand more serious blows.”

“Who are you?” He grins in earnest, and looks past the ceiling of the _Falcon_ for a second. 

“Someone who has inadvertently caused you a lot of trouble”. Then there’s a sharp crackle on her comm, and he is gone, leaving Rey with only with the smell of her soldering iron and a faint waft of desert air.   

Rey finishes her lightsaber-turned-staff with Kylo leaning quietly against a wall she can’t see. Dark eyes carefully watch every minute movement of her soldering iron, and his lips quirk up into a lopsided smirk when she powers down the tool and hastily discards her mask. The bunk isn’t big enough for her to swing her staff in, let alone ignite the twin blades, but she still pulls the finished piece from the pseudo-workbench and admires it at arm’s length. 

“That reinforcing you did against the conductors is ingenious,” the Supreme Leader comments from his vantage point, and Rey flushes at the compliment. His face is open and warm as he regards her, and Rey feels almost like they’re back in her little hut on Ahch-To. Kylo pushes himself off of the wall she cannot see and takes a step towards her, long legs closing the small distance between them like nothing at all.

“I’m proud,” he murmurs, and Rey wants desperately to kiss him. 

She can see it in his eyes (feel it singing across the bond), that he does too. For a moment there’s no sound in the room, not even their breathing, and Rey fears that the Force is going to yank him away. But instead of vanishing Kylo Ren dips his head, and softly, _gently,_ brushes his lips against her temple.

 

* * *

  

Rey learns that the name of the other man who visits her through the Force is Anakin, and that he has been dead for a long time.

“I loved her fearsomely,” he tells her one night as they sit in the cockpit of the _Falcon_ , the blue glow of hyperspace casting her in much the same light as the man who sits beside her. “So much so that my descent to the Dark was an intangible slip, masked entirely by how bright our love burned.” The tale he weaves is one of a boy born of desert sands and a life hard lived, of loss and betrayal and love ( _so much love_ ). 

Rey swallows thickly, and tries not to think of dark curls and a strong back pressed against her own.

“Ben Solo is no Sith.” Anakin states, wrists resting comfortably on his knees, “he does not deal in absolutes the way they do.”

Keen eyes shift her way, and Rey feels as if she’d been run through by a lightsaber.

“With one very notable exception.”

That night she dreams of the sands of Jakku, and Ben Solo draped in elaborate folds of fabric like the ones Anakin had told her to be a staple of the Naberrie house. 

Rey knows, like she knows the way air smells before a haboob, that she is no Jedi. There is no future for her among ossified codes and the high, hallowed halls of the Jedi who came before Luke. Anakin nods when she voices this opinion, taps the grip of her lightstaff where it lays across her knees with a twinkle in his eyes.  But if she is no Jedi, and Kylo ( _Ben_ , a quiet part of her mind supplies) is no Sith, then where does that leave them?

The next time she sees Kylo Ren, he looks exhausted, stripped down to just the barest layers of his uniform, hands free for once of their customary leather gloves. “The past is everywhere,” he sighs, calloused fingertips coming up to rub at his temples as Rey sips her caf and regards him from the other side of the bed. “We landed on Naboo today,” he offers as an explanation, and Rey feels Anakin’s presence ripple somewhere to her right.

“My family-” Kylo pauses, looks at her with Ben Solo’s eyes, “My family holds a strong connection to that place.”

“I know,” is all Rey can offer, as the man she sits opposite stretches out to lay his head across her lap.

“Everywhere I look they are there-“ He seems to struggle for a second, as if there’s something he wants to say but doesn’t quite know how. “I spent so long looking to my grandfather for guidance,” Ben sighs, and Rey fights to hide a smile, “and now here I am with my boots on the planet he fell in love on”. She wonders offhandedly if Ben’s been having any Force encounters outside of their own as well (something in the smug way Anakin flickers just out of perception makes her think yes).

One hand threads through his hair, and even though the man in her lap swells with an internal conflict more violent than the waves against Ahch-To’s shores, the Force around them is balanced, content.

The Resistance has been safely on the red dirt soil of Geonosis for a solid twelve light cycles (twelve light cycles that Ben has been notably silent for) when Rey receives summons from the General. She is midway through her favorite offensive lightstaff form, running through the motions fluidly as Anakin watches on, arms folded and lips set in a pleased smirk. The Force ghost has taken to training her, guiding her footsteps along the tenuous path she’s chosen between Light and Dark.

“I was never any good at treading the line between the two,” he laughs, one hand reaching up to scratch the back of his head when she voices her tentative plan, “Qui-Gon would have made for a better Mentor.” (Rey notes with a smile that he does not say Master). 

But still, he helps, and Rey finds herself more comfortable in the Force than she’s ever been before under his tutelage. They are the same, she and Anakin, both creatures born of orange sand, into lives that did not want them; creatures born with the Light and Dark hopelessly tangled within their chests.

“General Organa has requested your presence in the Command Center.” A young missive states, face flushing warm as Rey’s twin blades deactivate. Anakin winks out of existence with a roguish grin on his face, and the distinct feeling of a complicated plan gone right. Rey throws the lightstaff onto her back, thanks the missive, and takes off across Geonosis’ blustery red landscape. Even before her feet have begun to move, Rey knows exactly what has happened.

“Where is he?” She pants when her dusty boots finally cross the threshold into the sterile white light of the Command Center, heedless of disbelieving stares cast her way. Leia gestures to a faint ping on the holoscreen, approximately four parsecs away from their current location, eyes tight at the edges.

“Take the _Falcon_ ,” the older woman breathes, just barely holding back tears, “bring him home.” Rey nods, fruitlessly reaches out for Ben across the Force, and turns on her heel.

Her heart rate doesn’t slow from the second she turns to run out of the Command Center until she’s input his coordinates into the _Falcon_ and jumped to Hyperspace. Alone, exhausted, and more nervous than she’d like to admit, Rey sinks back into the Captain’s seat, and realizes that she’s about to bring Ben Solo home.

She sits like that for a long time, before the Force ripples around her, filling the cockpit with its tides. When Anakin appears, he isn’t alone, his flesh and bone arm linked comfortably through that of the most beautiful woman Rey has ever seen.

“His vitals are stable,” The Jedi-turned-Sith-turned-Jedi again smiles, answering the question she hadn’t quite had the courage to ask. “Padmé got him out of there as safely as was possible.” Anakin turns to press a kiss into his lover’s hair, and the woman with Ben’s eyes gives her a soft smile. Rey’s nose is filled with the scent of wildflowers in the peak of summer.

“Thank you,” she breathes, overwhelmed with the love and the light and the smell of things growing. Ben’s Grandparents give her one last conspiratorial grin before vanishing, leaving Rey to watch the parsecs between her and Ben’s coordinates dwindle away with each standard second that passes.

The drop out of hyperspace reveals a one-man shuttle floating, powered entirely down ( _to avoid detection_ a soft, female voice whispers against her temple) and almost invisible against the overwhelming black of space. There’s not a single planet in sight, just the faint winking of distant stars, and Ben’s shuttle like a beacon. Around her, the Force is the most present she’s ever felt it, taught as a drum skin hung to sell in Niima outpost. Rey’s heart stops, before thundering back to life with a shock that sends her fingers flying across the control board. The _Falcon’s_ tractor beam stutters to life, and Rey feels like five years have past in the time it takes the ship to reel Ben’s shuttle safely into its cargo hold. 

Rey of Jakku rounds the corner into the _Millennium Falcon’s_ cargo bay exactly as the shuttle lowers its boarding ramp with a long suffering hiss. The metal is pockmarked with blaster hits just barely withstood, and Rey wonders exactly what kind of miracle Ben and Padmé had to procure in order to get him safely outside of First Order territories. The Force trembles, tight almost to the point of snapping, until all thoughts are driven from her mind when Ben stumbles into view, disoriented, clearly exhausted, and clutching one side of his torso as if wounded.

“Rey,” he breathes, and the Force sings across the stars.

Her feet are running before she realizes what’s happening, and suddenly she’s in his arms, heedless of the blood seeping through his flight shirt and into her tunic, focused only on the way his arms come forward to wrap around her. He smells like Hyperspace and the same soap she remembered from their first few tentative connections after Crait, and she feels the tears springing to her eyes long before they fall.

“They asked me to raze Naboo,” he chokes out, face buried in her hair, “and I couldn’t do it.” Rey clings to him desperately, presses kisses against the rough fabric across his chest, “my Grandmother came to me through the force,” Ben continues, wonder clear in his low voice. “She helped me escape.”

His throat is thick with tears too, and together they cry in the cargo hold of his Father’s ship.

“You saved me,” he pulls back just enough to gaze at Rey with his Grandmother’s eyes, “you brought me home”.

And then they are kissing, tears flowing freely as Ben’s hands cling to Rey like he’ll never let go, and her fingers tangle so tightly into his hair that she’s sure it must sting. The Force swells between them, filling the _Falcon_ in its entirety, and Rey gasps as Ben presses his lips to her nose, the underside of her jaw; slowly working his way down until the once Supreme Leader has his knees on the ground and his ear pressed to her heart reverently.

“I love you.” He confesses into her chest, chapped lips catching on the rough weave of her outer tunic. Rey sinks to the ground, pulls him fully into her arms, and buries her nose deep in the curls of his hair (curls she now knows he comes by from his Grandfather). There’s no need to respond, not when their bond is the most thrown open its ever been, emotions flowing freely between the two as they cling to one another.

So instead, Rey presses a kiss to his temple like he did hers so long ago, next his forehead, before dusting her lips across the top of the scar she’d left him. Ben stares up at her like the entire galaxy rests laureled upon her head, and then they are kissing again.

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to drop me prompts at my tumblr: _hyperphonic_  
> 


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